DragonByte Tech add-ons not coming to XF anytime soon

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If you are a vB admin you likely have at the very least heard of DragonByte Tech and their multitude of pretty awesome add-ons they released for vB. Perhaps you are even eagerly awaiting a port of their add-ons to XF. Unfortunately it seems that it won't be happening anytime soon.

Here's an excerpt of what DBT had to say about porting to XF:
Feel free to let the XenForo Devs know you want DBTech mods on XF, if enough people do they may be willing to sit down and make some small changes to make porting mods to their platform easier.

Obviously I do not know what those "small changes" are and what impact they would have on XF as a whole, but it is pretty clear to me from that conversation that unless those changes are made DBT won't be porting to XF due to the port being far too time consuming.
 
Perhaps you'd be better off asking them what the changes are they want making.

I'm not aware of anything from them posted here on the site about what issues it is they have with the code.

Plenty of other developers seem to manage OK.
 
Weird that they have never made the suggestions for the changes they want, and expect them to be done.

Porting any modification (or design) is time consuming, so I don't get why it would be any different for any other platform.
 
I'd actually do it all for them, but they failed to mention what it was I had to do, so yeah...

Ask me again next year?
 
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Let's not bring out the torches and pitchforks just yet. Hopefully Decado will be able to shed some light on this soo­n™.
 
Here's an excerpt of what DBT had to say about porting to XF:
An excerpt, so there's more? Can you link me to the area? I'd be interested in seeing what they had to say about the process. They weren't expecting to change a couple of sessions and expect the code to work were they? :rolleyes:
 
Between DBT's coding experience in general and the add-ons they have released for XF:

[DBTech] Top X Stats

[DBTech] Users Viewing Thread

[DragonByte] xFShout [AJAX]

it's probably reasonable to assume that they have some level of understanding of what's required to port their vB mods to XF.

Decado wrote earlier this year:

Decado said:
The porting of mods proved to be much more time consuming than we had anticipated, and we had to make it secondary to our vBulletin mods for the sake of our customers - we do still have several mods in various stages of development, but unfortunately they are not our primary focus at the moment.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/dragonbyte-xfshout-ajax.7867/page-4#post-163242
 
I read that quote about them being time-consuming. I was referring to the quote in your OP and where it originated from:
Feel free to let the XenForo Devs know you want DBTech mods on XF, if enough people do they may be willing to sit down and make some small changes to make porting mods to their platform easier.
 
Let's not bring out the torches and pitchforks just yet. Hopefully Decado will be able to shed some light on this soo­n™.

My post wasn't to mob them or anything, but more if they need something changed why haven't they made a suggestion as such to Kier and Mike in the proper forums?

If the developers aren't told what they would like to have changed, it will never be changed unless they're like expecting Mike and Kier to go out of their way to contact them and make whatever adjustments they need.
 
I guess if they had the time to tell other people of their concerns they would have had time to allocate a minute of their time to contact the devs directly or leave their concerns in the suggestions area. It's a case of "if you don't ask, you don't get". No developer should ever have to run after people. The whole point in the concerns you have is to provide feedback/suggestions giving an outside view what could be better, what can be improved, sometimes it takes another set of eyes to point this out something they have not done yet. :rolleyes:
 
Figured I should pop in here before it becomes dramatic =P. The first thing i'll do is provide the full context of the reply - it doesn't change much, but clarity always tends to be better.

We had an email saying: Question:
"Do you have any plans to port your vB add-ons over to Xenforo? When I say any I mean actually completing some of the ports within the next 12 months? Trying to decide whether it's worth to go with Xenforo or whether I should buy vB and the Xenforo modding scene is rather tiny at this point. Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide."

Not the first email like that we've received. My reply in full was:
"We plan on taking another look at XenForo at the end of the summer. When we first looked at porting our mods laster winter it was going to prove too time consuming to be a viable prospect. It's something we hope to be able to do but I can't really say we will until we complete a feasability study.

Feel free to let the XenForo Devs know you want DBTech mods on XF, if enough people do they may be willing to sit down and make some small changes to make porting mods to their platform easier."

Our stance has always been that it's something we want to do, but that the last time we looked it was just too time consuming to be practical. As i said the last time we had a real look was winter, so i'm not sure if much has changed in that time (I also try to make sure i mention the time frames to people who ask).

As far as exact changes - I don't have any to suggest. Our coders aren't familiar enough with MVC for that to be honest. My personal hope was that there would be ways to allow for an easier "translation" process in some way, where it could be made as simple and easy as possible to show ways to convert the traditional vb model code over to an MVC compatible format, and that those could be communicated easily to the modders.

Just to make it as clear as possible here - at no point was my suggestion that Kier and Mike had done anything "wrong" to make it difficult to port the mods, most of the difficulty just comes from the MVC format. I was hoping (key word there being hope) that there was something they could do to make the process easier - not that there was some obvious thing they had just failed to do.

That could be the case already (I hope it is!), but as i said we haven't taken a serious look since winter. It was absolutely my bad to make the suggestion when I haven't checked what the status is regarding any changes made between then and now to be honest (Technically I should probably check more before making this post as well, but I think it's more important to clear it up first.)

Iain
 
Figured I should pop in here before it becomes dramatic =P. The first thing i'll do is provide the full context of the reply - it doesn't change much, but clarity always tends to be better.

Case and Point as to why people shouldn't take things out of context.
 
Thanks for the clarification. The developers did state that there will be a learning curve when working with XF, but once you've taken the time to learn the new framework it becomes pleasant and easier to work with. Of course it could be a problem to ask your current vBulletin developers to learn an MVC framework and a whole new architecture, but perhaps you could assign different coders to the XenForo platform (I read you have a couple of new coders in a trial period?)
 
Thanks for the clarification. The developers did state that there will be a learning curve when working with XF, but once you've taken the time to learn the new framework it becomes pleasant and easier to work with. Of course it could be a problem to ask your current vBulletin developers to learn an MVC framework and a whole new architecture, but perhaps you could assign different coders to the XenForo platform (I read you have a couple of new coders in a trial period?)

We do, No XF coders at this point though - we are hoping to find a couple in the next couple of months to help spearhead our proposed XF expansion though - with that in mind feel free to let us know if you think there are any XF coders who might be interested.

Iain
 
We do, No XF coders at this point though - we are hoping to find a couple in the next couple of months to help spearhead our proposed XF expansion though - with that in mind feel free to let us know if you think there are any XF coders who might be interested.

Iain
I suppose it depends on what incentives someone has to create mods with the DBTech brand as opposed to their own. Browse the add-on releases forum and create PCs. It can't hurt to ask, right? :)
 
Just some of their add-ons seems a little over-priced for what they are worth, hell, there is properly add-ons available for XF that do the same job for free.
 
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